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So, geriatrician Walter Bortz, one of the few MDs at Stanford who isn't in favor of single payer (because decades of increasing numbers of otherwise perfectly healthy diabetics have ticked him off so much he wants obese people to have to pay more -- "risk-adjusted premium mandatory universal coverage" -- which is really unlikely to work in U.S. courts) gave a colloquium for his new book back on May 26th, followed by a Commonwealth Club talk a few days later. He's probably doing the talk shows too for all I know. He says twin studies have shown that genes are responsible for 15% of human aging, but it wasn't clear what that meant. So I mentioned that we are all the product of immortal (billions of years old) germ cell lines, and that any multicellular organism is selected for optimum age to benefit its population, not the individuals, in response to resources and environmental stresses such as predators. So it's likely that genes are responsible for determining far more than 15% of lifespan, although it will be a long time before we run out of environmental and intrinsic nongenetic factors.... Anyway I can't remember where I was going with this.

I was born with a condition that would have killed me without swift surgical intervention. My girlfriend, too, three times over now. Think hard, now - would you be alive without medical and scientific intervention?

Oh, good catch. I'm sure all the, you know, medical professionals dealing with this person totally forgot to discuss with her the syndrome whose name is printed all over her notes and its effect on the child they're trying to make her conceive. Thank you for being the lone voice of reason to scream "But you're defective, woman! Don't breed!"

A genetic disease is usually what happens if you draw an unlucky combination of perfectly good gene variants (well, averagely good ones) from your parents: they're not indicators of overall gene quality (indeed, the genes usually confer a benefit on heterozygous offspring), and they're very likely not to make it to the next generation unless you self-fertilize.

MRKH syndrome doesn't even reduce life expectancy very much (girls born with MRKH have the same life expectancy as boys overall): congenital absence of one organ complex or another isn't that unusual, and usually causes only the obvious problems. Well, those and a lifetime of being exposed to eugenics idiocy, particularly if you dare have children.